The Pirate Bay on trial: Four men are accused of helping millions of internet users download copyrighted material. The industry has called on internet service providers to censor such websites.
Last week the trial involving four men accused of helping millions of users download movies, games, software and music through their site The Pirate Bay begun in Stockholm. Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Carl Lundström face up to two years in prison, damages of €10 million and a €115,000 fine for facilitating the distribution of copyrighted material.
The trial dubbed “spectrial”, as the defendants considered it a spectacle, has not gone according to the IFPI’s (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) plans thus far. Half of the charges against the men were dropped as the prosecutors fumbled on defining The Pirate Bay as the source of the Bittorrent files (The Pirate Bay’s computer servers never actually hosted any copyright-infringing files) and the defendants have been gaining notoriety by using their Twitter accounts to ridicule the case ranging from expressing boredom (“#spectrial is so boring. It’s sleepy”) to joy at their supposed winning of the case (“EPIC WINNING LOL”).
The rest of Europe has responded similarly. In Norway and here in Ireland, representative bodies of the music industry have called on ISPs such as Eircom to block access to sites such as The Pirate Bay. Eircom has said it will comply without question and a list of similar sites are said to also be blocked. In Norway however, the reaction is a little different. The Minister for Education Bård Vegar Solhjell has called for the legalisation of file-sharing. On his blog, he argued that the music industry should embrace the technology instead of fighting it, a pragmatic solution echoed by many advocates of Bittorrent technology.
To coincide with the Oscars on Sunday, the FBI announced that they had tracked down two Californian Bittorrent users who shared review copies of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire and Australia via the technology. The two have a week to surrender to authorities and could face up to three years in prison, or a $250,000 fine.
It’s important to note that the technology itself is not illegal rather it is the data that is shared via Bittorrent that is deemed so. Bittorrent is used to spread a lot of different media as well as copyrighted material. Low-budget documentaries, free software and non-commercial legal music (Nine Inch Nails last year used the technology to share free albums) all benefit from the technology. It has been harnessed as a way of sharing legal data for those who have not got access to costly distribution networks.
In addition, blocking sites from all users at the ISP-level can be considered censorship of public interest and a move to curtail of internet freedom. Does this rule also apply to sites like YouTube who unwittingly host a lot of copyrighted material. Will they be blocked too?
Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay four are viewed as rebels in hitherto uncharted waters, sticking it to the man in court and championing technology in the process. For many younger internet users, The Pirate Bay case only serves to reinforce the bad guy image of the music industry, regardless of the outcome.
